 Imagine living on a small island surrounded by crystal clear waters and picturesque beaches. Sounds like paradise, but for many small island communities, their idyllic surroundings are under threat. Rising sea levels, climate change and human activities are risking their water systems and way of life. Republic of the Maldives has more than 187 inhabited islands. So this is a typical example of the challenges that a small island developing state faces in terms of environmental management, water management and infrastructure in general. In this documentary, we are going to introduce you to the groundbreaking project called Sustaining Small Scale Water Systems or 3S Water for short. Together with local knowledge and co-learning with communities, this project aims to understand, improve the aquatic ecosystem and water challenges in the island and in the surrounding environment. You know, these kind of coral islands, you can see the ocean in either side. So these are very small geographies. So as a result, what you have is very thin freshwater layer. If you drill the ground here, in about one meter, you find the freshwater and then if you drill further to about three, four meters, it depends on the size of the islands and the season. You encounter saltwater and because of environmental change, climate change, sea level rise and human activities in the island, this freshwater layer is under threat, both in terms of quantity, that is the lens thickness is reducing and quality. In this island, for example, during, especially during dry period, if you smell the ground water, you can really feel a kind of foul smell in that. Nobody exactly knows what is the reason for that, but we suspect that that is contamination with, for example, sewage or some other kind of pollutants. Most of the islanders, they say that even with the water supply provided to this island, still ground water is a resource that they want to improve and they want to continue using because this is one of their two traditional sources of water, the other one being collected drain water. If you talk to the people who are living in these islands, they would attest that first they do not like so much to drink this tap water because they find it too hard because these are people who are used to drink rainwater historically, so their pallets are used to more softer waters. What kind of water do you like to drink? Bottle water? Tap water? I like water, I like rainwater. Rainwater? Yes. Because it's more fresh than that. Even the bottle water is not nice, no? I don't like bottle water, I like a drain water. Rainwater? Okay. The 3S Water Project aims to understand the water system of these islands, especially from the angles of water security, aquatic ecosystems, and environmental degradation. We are going to work together with local communities, co-learning, looking at traditional practices, at the same time doing state of the art environmental monitoring like, you know, continuous testing of ground water, monitoring of rainfall, etc. to have a holistic understanding of the water system of these islands. Sometimes during the dry season, the government of the Maldives has to ship water all the way from the capital Mali at an enormous cost. Now, recently the government has taken steps to develop water supply systems with a pledge that every household in these 187 islands will receive tap water to their houses. As you can notice, in this particular kitchen there are two faucets. This particular faucet brings water from the water supply system. So, no smell. This one is from the well water, the ground water. Smells. But you may ask why people still use ground water. That has to do with economics because what they say is that if you use tap water for everything, it ends up being pretty expensive for them. The plumbing system of these houses are pretty complicated because oftentimes you have three different water sources. Each being carried by a separate plumbing system. Often there are cross connections. So, contamination of one water source from the other is very common here. In the three years water project, we follow a mixed method approach. We do environmental monitoring using state-of-the-art monitoring equipment. At the same time we do ethnographic surveys having very detailed observations and conversations with the islands inhabitants. This is to understand what is the reality about their interaction with their own environment and the water system. In this project we aim to set up some pilot infiltration facilities to look at whether infiltrating rainwater as opposed to sending it to the ocean would help improve in the ground water quality. When I was doing reconnaissance with our team, what I realized is that these islanders, they had the traditional way of doing that. So, this is a very simple infiltration pit. The beauty of this is that this is a traditional thing that Maldivian out-islands communities have been doing for some time. What we are doing here is we are going to put a second barrel to increase the effectiveness of infiltration and we will connect the second barrel to the first barrel. So, when the first barrel overflows during a heavy rainfall, water comes to the second barrel and increases the infiltration rate. Something interesting you learn about mosques in this inhabited islands in the Maldives, the well in the mosque, most of the times it has good quality water. Traditionally, mosques in this region, they do a lot of infiltrate water into the ground. For example, if you look at the ground here, you can see that the paving stones are interleaved with some slots and those slots enable water to be infiltrated freely into the ground. Earlier we saw this infiltration pit, so that is also something they do. So, that gives us hope that if you do these kind of good practices all around in the island, maybe we can easily improve the water system. So, one of the aims of this project is also to document this traditional knowledge and encourage the use of good practices and work together with the communities. Our partner, CEL, they are a local community organization. So, all the members come from the households here. So, they have their day jobs, so they are working in this NGO, local NGO as volunteers. But with that setup, what we have is we have a very strongly embedded kind of activities in the island society. Actually, I am very happy to have a project like this here. Doing the project, we will find the reasons why this water is having the smell and how we can react to those kind of issues in this kind of remote islands. So, once again we hope this will be a successful project here in this V-Moto. The project does not stop at only discovering knowledge, but we also do capacity development and institutional strengthening activities. 3S Water Project have started a training program on water safety plans, which is start from an online course and then followed by a phase-to-phase training on water safety plan development. We are selecting several students to follow MSc degrees in local universities in the Maldives and these students will take up research assignments that are related to the 3S water project. Our ambition is to recruit students from the pilot islands themselves so that these students are well aware about their own environment and their water problems and they have a stake in solving these problems, not only as academic exercises but a matter of improving their own quality of life and their families.